Kolos is permanently banned because it was obvious that you did not want him in ELO any more. He’s been banned nearly every weeks since the voting system release and we thought it was pointless to keep on using your votes against him.

Marco, Zatman, Hawk and Ratanah have also been frequently banned by your votes so we thought that these permanent bans would offer a fairer game.
Admittedly Ratanah was banned less often than Shakra but we calculated that her ban would greatly help in reducing the Roots' dominance while still making them playable. Whereas Shakra’s ban would have left the Roots with very strong chances of building powerful half-decks for a reasonable amount of stars.

We didn’t want to ban any All Stars or Piranas (Smokey or Striker, for example) even if they were concentrating a large part of votes. We figured out you would be more free to vote and decide by yourselves which characters need to be remove from ELO.

I think Kolos deserves a ban because he was already banned every week. The rest shouldn't be banned yet. The thing that I don't like about these new "perma-bans" is that now the votes will be concentrated on other cards that I like to use as well. By taking away these five cards, you are also pretty much placing a permanent ban on Smokey, Striker, Caelus, and probably one of the Pussycats like Charlie.

I especially like the banning of Ratanah and Zatman as these cards are definitely overpowered and critical to any Roots and Uppers setup. Banning of Hawk and Marco seems necessary to avoid players from abusing two five star cards in a Rescue and Sentinel decks, which again is extremely common in Elo. I am on the fence with Kolos but I guess it's a good thing since most players prefer Elo to be more skill based rather than luck based.

I know whatever they do, there is absolute no chance making everyone happy.

This ruins many decks, along with mine. But I beileve that do not mean the survivors will have time celebrating. Soon the banning votes will go to those new top candidates and we will in the end see a more diversified metagame.

It's sad to see Zatman and Marco go again after being released from the permanent bans

I expected Kolos to be banned eventually, but Nightmare now have several strong options so they're not cripple by the loss.

Hawk was also an expected ban, but I think this drops the Sentinel effectiveness quite a bit

Ratannah's ban was also kind of expected, though like Nightmare, it doesn't cripple them.

While these bans will now open up more cards to the vote banning system, I don't know how much variety you'll see week-to-week... I expect that other cards will just get banned constantly now, like Smokey, Striker, Shakra, and Dorian